This is this third of a three part post in which two people discuss the difficulty of presenting history and culture in classrooms.
Jessica: It’s easy to get invective about this stuff, and political, and shrill, no matter what choices you make. But I have this way I try to think about it to avoid that.
Adam: What?
Jessica: Well, I think of dance traditions. When I was a kid I happened to see a Scottish Country Dancing group performing once. It’s this obscure and complicated social dance tradition. It’s a social dance, with men on one side, women on the other in a set, and a lot of figures done with specific steps. I really like the way it looked, and eventually I got connected with a group that did Scottish Country Dancing and started learning.
It was the first kind of dancing I had ever done, so I started with learning basic coordination and moving around space, and looking partners in the eye, and offering firm hands. Lots of things that transfer to any kind of dance. And I also learned a lot of things that have to do only with that kind of dance–the steps and figures. It’s a pretty complicated and proscribed dance form, as far as social dancing goes.
Eventually, I realized that social dance forms are excellent commentary on social expectations in the culture that created them. Scottish Country Dancing involves responsibility not just to your partner but to the whole set; it’s rigid in movement, with upper body upright and lots of steps. It’s hard, vigorous work, mentally and physically. Men and women have equally interesting and equally complicated parts, and mostly do the same kinds of things. Men can ask women and women can ask men. It’s very much itself and not any other thing. That dance form is a particular culture “selving” itself.
Since then, I’ve dipped my toe in other traditions, though I never became quite as proficient in any others. All social dance traditions require a certain amount of immersion, a certain amount of time. But I’m so grateful that I really mastered one. It makes it easier to hop over and try other dances because I have down some of the basic framework of dancing at all and know to look for patterns, and all that. But it’s also a great satisfaction to be able to do one kind of dance really, really well, to enter into its particular beauty.
Scottish Country Dancing is, of course, not superior to other forms of social dancing. It misses the passion of Latin dancing, the elegance of ballroom, the improvisational intensity of swing, the measured pleasantry of English Country. But just because I recognize the beauty of other traditions doesn’t mean I would want to try to include Latin passion and ballroom elegance and swing whimsy in Scottish Country Dancing. It wouldn’t be itself anymore. By trying to include everything, it would become incoherent. Dance needs limits and proscriptions and boundaries in order to exist at all, just like culture and just like language. And that’s an equally negative and positive thing. It’s just a fact. By being one thing, a dance form isn’t other things.
And recognizing the beauty of of other forms also doesn’t mean that I wish I hadn’t been taught my own quite so rigorously and taken quite so much time with it. It’s got its quirks and faults, but it is my dance form. I picked it for myself, because that’s we do in 21st century America. But in another time and place, I wouldn’t have picked my social dance form for myself. I would just grow up dancing a certain way, along with everyone else I know. And that would be a blessing.
No matter how you acquired it, though it’s a blessing to have your own dance, the kind you know so well that you can live in it. We are gluttons of choice, so our impulse might be to take a “social dancing” class that has a little bit of a lot of traditions, but to me that seems like skimming, even using, not entering in. It’s less incarnated, and it takes more mental energy. It’s so nice when you get to the point where the dance is natural and free, the mental pathways well-worn and the muscles accustomed.
I want my students to have that for a culture and language as well, and, for better or worse, I use the one in front of me. And since it’s there, we might as well celebrate what’s good and true and beautiful in it as well as acknowledging it’s failings. And for all that Western culture has done wrong and excluded and oppressed, it’s also true that it’s got some beautiful thoughts in some beautiful words that echoed down the centuries, and since that’s the material I have to work with, I work with it gladly.
Adam: Huh. Well, I’m still not convinced you have the right approach.
Jessica: I’m not either.
Adam: I’d be afraid of upholding systematic oppression by blithely accepting those norms.
Jessica: Yeah. I am. My hope is that, having learned their own tradition well, my students will start to improvise with it, change it, help it to grow. But in the end, I’m not always sure how they’ll use what they’ve studied.
Adam: I don’t know, just throw in some Pablo Neruda now and then I guess.
Jessica: Oh yeah! “Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente…”
Adam: Yeah, that’s a good one.
Jessica: Yeah it is.
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CC photo courtesy of Ian Robertson on Flickr.